Monday, September 25, 2006

my iPod artwork addiction

Aside from being my newest toy, my iPod has also become a sort of obsession with me lately. I spent last weekend re-ripping some of my CDs to put them on the iPod and re-tagging tracks so I can find them on the iPod. I've spent the past few evenings trying to get all of the album artwork set properly in iTunes so that the CD cover will appear on the iPod while a track is playing. iTunes will automatically supply the artwork for albums if:

iTunes sells the album or songs from it in the Store

the album is tagged properly so iTunes can recognize it

Nearly all of my rock and pop CDs have the correct album art, but my classical CDs largely do not. At first I tried looking up the albums in the iTunes store and re-tagging my music to match the listing in the Store. This approach failed more times than it worked, so I resigned myself to scanning my CD covers and applying the artwork manually. Then I read a post on an Apple discussion board that suggested using Google to find the album art. Instead of Google, I used Amazon.com to look up CDs, then I copied the CD cover graphic from the web page and pasted it into iTunes. But I have so many CDs without artwork that for each one I add, it seems like I have two more to fix. And when I sit down to fix a few CDs, I end up spending an hour correcting as many as I can. "Just one more," I tell myself, "and then I'll go to bed."

The worst part? When I listen to music on my iPod, I'm not looking at it -- it's always in my bag or on my desk and out of the way. So I don't even see all this album cover art I've gone to such lengths to add to my collection. But the process of adding the artwork has become an addiction. I may need an iPod support group soon.